By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the

Host: The night dripped with silence, broken only by the distant sound of a river grinding against stone. A streetlamp flickered at the edge of a bridge, throwing thin veins of light over wet cobblestones. The city slept beneath a blanket of fog, but two figures stood still in the mist — Jack and Jeeny — their shadows long and trembling on the pavement.

A faint church bell tolled somewhere far off, its echo rolling like memory through the empty streets.

Between them, a phrase glowed softly on Jack’s phone screen — words from another age, another soul:
"By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound." — Angelus Silesius

The words hung between them like a whisper from eternity.

Jeeny: “Isn’t it strange, Jack? That everything we become — our ruin, our redemption — comes from the same source. Our will.”

Jack: “Or our illusion of it.”

Jeeny: “You don’t believe in will?”

Jack: “I believe in physics. Cause and effect. Neurons firing because something made them fire. You call it will. I call it programming.”

Host: The fog thickened, swallowing their voices for a heartbeat. Jack’s breath steamed in the cold air; Jeeny’s hair, damp from the mist, clung to her face.

Jeeny: “So you think everything we do is predetermined? That every choice, every heartbreak, every act of love is just… machinery?”

Jack: “Look around you. Every decision we make is built on conditions we didn’t choose — genetics, trauma, society. You think you’re free, but you’re just executing the code written by your past.”

Jeeny: “Then how do you explain forgiveness? Or sacrifice? When someone gives their life for another — where does that come from, Jack? What algorithm writes that?”

Jack: “Survival. Tribal instinct. We evolved to protect what we value. Even martyrdom serves a pattern.”

Jeeny: (softly) “That’s such a lonely way to live.”

Host: The lamp above them buzzed faintly, casting a halo of gold over the bridge, as if some invisible force refused to let darkness have the final word.

Jack: “Maybe loneliness is the truth. Maybe will is just a story we tell to survive it. You know what Silesius missed? That being ‘lost’ or ‘found’ is irrelevant — we were never steering in the first place.”

Jeeny: “But if you truly believed that, you wouldn’t be fighting so hard to justify it.”

Jack: “What’s that supposed to